When We Were Animals(76)

“Jesus Christ,” he hissed. “The f*ck do you think you’re doing?” His eyes dropped to the book, and I thought I saw something open in them for just a second—but then disdain smeared his features. “What are you doing here, anyway? You come here to make me into a better person? You want to save me? From all this shit? You gonna lift me up? All your f*cking decency.”

He struck the book out of my hand and sent it flying across the room.

And that’s when I did something. I took a step forward and stood in front of him, craning my neck to snarl upward at him.

“What are you doing?” he said, and his voice was different now—surprised—as though he were speaking to a different person entirely.

I dared him. I would dare him.

“It’s not full moon,” he said.

My hand reached up and slapped him. He did nothing. My hand slapped him again, harder. It would numb itself on his face. It would draw out the taint, but not for me to cure. I wasn’t there for purity.

My hand drew back again, but it didn’t have time to strike. He grabbed my arm, way up by the shoulder, gripping it with one thick hand, which encircled it completely. He pulled my face to his, but we did not kiss. This was not about kisses. We breathed each other’s air, hot and salty.

Then he took me down to the gritty braided rug that covered the wooden floor of his room, still gripping my arm. My choice was to go with him or have my frail limb pulled from its socket. There would be bruises.

He surveyed my body as though he hadn’t seen it before. It wasn’t the same as before. The full moon had made things different. Now there was clarity in his eyes, and disgust, and worship.

Something swelled in me, in my chest and stomach. Something awful grew there, I knew. I could feel the tears coming. Using all my strength, I turned him over, climbed on top of him, and bit at his neck and arms. He tried to push me off, but I bit harder, digging my fingers into his clothes and skin. I would not release. He must’ve known I would not release.

“Stop,” he said.

But I did not stop. The room stank.

He tried to fling me away, but he only succeeded in rolling over on top of me again. I felt the buttons and zippers of his clothes chafing against my skin. He seized one of my wrists and then another, got them both in his left hand, and held my struggling hands down against the floor above my head.

He had me pinned, and then I felt I could breathe for the first time. I breathed. I licked my lips.

“What are you doing?” he said.

I grunted.

“What?”

“Stop it,” I said.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Me. I want you to stop me.” And then there were tears. I could feel them on my cheeks. My body shook with fury. I craned my neck to bite his face. I would have gnawed off the skin of his face had I gotten it between my teeth.

With his free hand, he grabbed me by the neck and forced my head back down. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe at all—and that felt all right, too. Then he let up.

“You stop you,” he said.

“I can’t. Hurt it.”

“Hurt what?”

“The thing that’s wrong, inside me. Hurt it. I hate it, and I want it to hurt.”

Then maybe he understood. Because he was using one hand to unzip his pants, while I writhed there on the ground, my body convulsed in a furious paroxysm. Like an epileptic, I arched my back and bit at the air with my jaw.

And I couldn’t move at all, because his weight was like a sack of iron ingots, pressing me down, and my arms were pinned, and my legs were growing numb, and I said, “Do it, do it,” and it was safe because my body was leashed, finally leashed, and I could even feel beautiful and pure and light again because he was beating away all the ugliness in me, hammering it down into a safe little knot that couldn’t hurt anyone, and none of it was my fault, it couldn’t be my fault, because I had grown wrong and I would pay for it, I would pay for it happily, I would pay for it and breathe again because you had to control wrong things, you had to choke them until they were still and everything was quiet, make me still, make me quiet, make me be still.

And Blackhat Roy pushed himself inside me, deep, to the core of it all, and I thought I must be depthless. He battered my body with his. It hurt between my legs, hurt in a way I could relish in the dark, secret parts of my mind.

Because there was a voice in the room, the low, sickly whine of an animal in pain or in thrall, the throaty mewl of gross instinct, and I heard the voice filling the place and oozing down the walls. It was my voice, I realized. It was a voice to curl all the pages of my books.

This had nothing to do with love or faith or play. It was ugly and selfish. It burned.

And I wept. I knew because I could feel the wetness in my ears. I cried and wailed. I moaned there in the dusty afternoon, and outside the woods went silent and all the tree toads and the crickets muted their song out of dumb respect for me. I was an animal of pain, and the forest listens for such things.

And then he hushed me. I remember it, even now. It’s a thing beyond forgetting. He clamped a palm down tight over my mouth, but the sound still came from the organ of my throat, and he didn’t know what to do. So with his other hand, he covered my eyes. He blinded me.

And then did I hush truly. Like a horse blindfolded to keep it from spooking, and, too, my breathing, like a horse’s, huffing rapidly through my nose, the smell of Roy’s sour hand on my wet mouth.